By June some new problems emerged. My voice was really lacking volume and I began to notice that I was slurring words – it was as if I’d had too much to drink all the time.
How odd. Now there was something wrong with my left hand. It was really difficult to squeeze shampoo out of the bottle, and almost impossible to use nail clippers to cut the fingernails on my right hand. Around the same time, it also became impossible for me to cut my toenails – I just couldn’t bend down to reach without instant, painful cramp in my legs.
I still had a slight cough, and I had a real tickle in my throat when drinking water and cups of tea. Very uncomfortable. On 19 June I remember choking when eating some crisps. Three days later I developed a chest infection that required antibiotic treatment. It was hard to get help for a chest infection in the days of COVID-19 and the first hurdle had to be a negative test result. Naturally, we associated this chest infection with the pneumonia in Vietnam. Later it became obvious that both events were probably actually cases of aspiration pneumonia caused by choking and inhaling particles of food into the lungs.